Before social media it took a lot more effort to tell hundreds of strangers about diarrhea.
— Ben Johnson (@itisbenjo) July 1, 2013
I tweeted the above observation about social
media and diarrhea, and it is by far the most popular thing I’ve ever done. I
find this weird. Twitter is weird.
I have been shitting nonstop for the last
five days. It was either the Pad Thai or the mango and sticky rice from my
local Thai delivery place. My girlfriend had the “Say Hello With My New Friend”
maki and is not shitting uncontrollably. I presume she is shitting
controllably. She has not told me about it. It’s her body and her business. We
order from this Thai place because it’s funny to order a “Say Hello With My New
Friend.” It's like that line from Scarface except more like a description of taking your new puppy to the dog park and less like "I am holding some kind of a grenade-based weapon," except I am holding a grenade-based weapon, and it's my own butt.
I will not be ordering from there again.
I will not be ordering from there again.
I am a comedy guy, okay? I’ve spent a more
than necessary amount of my life trying to figure out how to be as funny as
possible. I’m not there yet. You can’t ever be there. You can just be excellent
every once in a while and think “all I have to do is keep being this good,” but
then you get overconfident and you ruin it. Comedy is a delicate beast. More
and more I realize I have no idea how it works. I thought I did back when I was
spending ten years of my life trying my damndest to figure it out, but there’s
no way of knowing if I’d be just as funny now without having done any of that
work.
Case in point: you can tweet something about
social media and diarrhea, something honest and simple but that is also a
stupid thing you said about social media and diarrhea, two of probably the
stupidest topics of conversation yet invented by man, and according to numbers
you can actually measure, it’s the most popular thing you’ve ever done in your
LIFE.
And NOTHING can prepare you for it.
If you read me a random printout of all my
tweets, I’d pick that one somewhere around 300th in a list of most good
and relevant things a person might be interested in showing to their friends. “GUACAMOLE
BEANBONES 4 EVA” or “PIZZA SANDWICHES WHERE THE BREAD IS PIZZA AND THE MEAT IS
PIZZA.” rank WAY higher.
Even on the subject of defecation, I’ve got “I
have to shit like a racehorse. Shitsomuch the racehorse. That's which one.”
Those are all PRIMO tweets. They got NOTHING.
NO ACTION.
I’m not mad about this. Just confused. It
turns out there is no TYPE of thing that people are going to go ga ga for.
You just have to keep preachin’ from the heart about what’s happening to your
asshole, and let the rest take care of itself, I guess. You can’t push it.
Especially me. I can’t push it, because it is
already halfway out of my butt in a furious unplanned explosion of undigested
liquid. It has been five days without a solid deuce. I’d consult a doctor, but
I’m finally in bikini shape.
